Mobile Push for Converged Mobile Services: The Airline Scenario

Abstract

In this chapter, we outline an event-based infrastructure that combines the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Web technologies in order to realize secure converged mobile services. Our main service scenario has been supporting proactive information delivery to airline customers. This application built on top of the infrastructure is designed to help customers in several airport activities, such as check-in and boarding, and to enable highly crowded airports to offer consumer services. We focus on the two key technologies, namely SIP and Web technologies, and outline a distributed system architecture that was developed for the airline scenario. The scenario involves supporting the identification and tracking of users across different networks, enabling proactive information delivery (push) to the devices, and supporting rich multimedia interactions with users. The push system architecture is based on a lightweight access network consists of access points and edge proxies. The edge proxies connect the mobile users to the information backbone in a secure way using TLS or DTLS connections.